Deep learning (DL) methods have been used increasingly widely, such as in the fields of speech and image recognition. However, how to design an appropriate DL model to accurately and efficiently classify electroencephalogram (EEG) signals is still a challenge, mainly because EEG signals are characterized by significant differences between two different subjects or vary over time within a single subject, non-stability, strong randomness, low signal-to-noise ratio. SincNet is an efficient classifier for speaker recognition, but it has some drawbacks in dealing with EEG signals classification. In this paper, we improve and propose a SincNet-based classifier, SincNet-R, which consists of three convolutional layers, and three deep neural network (DNN) layers. We then make use of SincNet-R to test the classification accuracy and robustness by emotional EEG signals. The comparable results with original SincNet model and other traditional classifiers such as CNN, LSTM and SVM, show that our proposed SincNet-R model has higher classification accuracy and better algorithm robustness.

Granger causality (GC) is one of the most popular measures to reveal causality influence of time series and has been widely applied in economics and neuroscience. Especially, its counterpart in frequency domain, spectral GC, as well as other Granger-like causality measures have recently been applied to study causal interactions between brain areas in different frequency ranges during cognitive and perceptual tasks. In this paper, we show that: 1) GC in time domain cannot correctly determine how strongly one time series influences the other when there is directional causality between two time series, and 2) spectral GC and other Granger-like causality measures have inherent shortcomings and/or limitations because of the use of the transfer function (or its inverse matrix) and partial information of the linear regression model. On the other hand, we propose two novel causality measures (in time and frequency domains) for the linear regression model, called new causality and new spectral causality, respectively, which are more reasonable and understandable than GC or Granger-like measures. Especially, from one simple example, we point out that, in time domain, both new causality and GC adopt the concept of proportion, but they are defined on two different equations where one equation (for GC) is only part of the other (for new causality), thus the new causality is a natural extension of GC and has a sound conceptual/theoretical basis, and GC is not the desired causal influence at all. By several examples, we confirm that new causality measures have distinct advantages over GC or Granger-like measures. Finally, we conduct event-related potential causality analysis for a subject with intracranial depth electrodes undergoing evaluation for epilepsy surgery, and show that, in the frequency domain, all measures reveal significant directional event-related causality, but the result from new spectral causality is consistent with event-related time-frequency power spectrum activity. The spectral GC as well as other Granger-like measures are shown to generate misleading results. The proposed new causality measures may have wide potential applications in economics and neuroscience.

Eye blink is an important and inevitable artifact during scalp electroencephalogram (EEG) recording. The main problem in EEG signal processing is how to identify eye blink components automatically with independent component analysis (ICA). Taking into account the fact that the eye blink as an external source has a higher sum of correlation with frontal EEG channels than all other sources due to both its location and significant amplitude, in this paper, we proposed a method based on correlation index and the feature of power distribution to automatically detect eye blink components. Furthermore, we prove mathematically that the correlation between independent components and scalp EEG channels can be translating directly from the mixing matrix of ICA. This helps to simplify calculations and understand the implications of the correlation. The proposed method doesn’t need to select a template or thresholds in advance, and it works without simultaneously recording an electrooculography (EOG) reference. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can automatically recognize eye blink components with a high accuracy on entire datasets from 15 subjects.

Emotion recognition has a wide range of potential applications in the real world. Among the emotion recognition data sources, electroencephalography (EEG) signals can record the neural activities across the human brain, providing us a reliable way to recognize the emotional states. Most of existing EEG-based emotion recognition studies directly concatenated features extracted from all EEG frequency bands for emotion classification. This way assumes that all frequency bands share the same importance by default; however, it cannot always obtain the optimal performance. In this paper, we present a novel multi-scale frequency bands ensemble learning (MSFBEL) method to perform emotion recognition from EEG signals. Concretely, we first re-organize all frequency bands into several local scales and one global scale. Then we train a base classifier on each scale. Finally we fuse the results of all scales by designing an adaptive weight learning method which automatically assigns larger weights to more important scales to further improve the performance. The proposed method is validated on two public data sets. For the “SEED IV” data set, MSFBEL achieves average accuracies of 82.75%, 87.87%, and 78.27% on the three sessions under the within-session experimental paradigm. For the “DEAP” data set, it obtains average accuracy of 74.22% for four-category classification under 5-fold cross validation. The experimental results demonstrate that the scale of frequency bands influences the emotion recognition rate, while the global scale that directly concatenating all frequency bands cannot always guarantee to obtain the best emotion recognition performance. Different scales provide complementary information to each other, and the proposed adaptive weight learning method can effectively fuse them to further enhance the performance.

Energy-efficient and secure wireless communications have recently earned tremendous interests due to economic, environmental and military concerns. This paper investigates the tradeoff between the secrecy throughput and the energy efficiency in cognitive radio networks (CRNs), where primary and secondary users with different priorities of spectrum access can either interfere or cooperate with each other. To gain an understanding of the intricate effects that system parameters have on network performance, we exclusively focus on characterizing several key aspects that may have potential impacts on secure CRNs, including the transmission power, the number of interfering users, and the interference resistance coefficient. Based on the obtained analytical results, we further propose a cooperative spectrum sharing paradigm to improve both the secrecy throughput and the energy efficiency of primary users. The main idea is that primary users lease a fraction of licensed spectrum to secondary users and in return, the secondary transmitter acts as both a relay for primary transmissions and a friendly jammer against eavesdropping. Both theoretical and numerical results disclose that: (i) When the interference from secondary transmitters is small, there is an optimal transmission power that maximizes the secrecy throughput for primary users compared to CRNs without the security issue